Divya Ghelani, one of our talented pool of creative writers, has recently received the exciting news that her Affective Digital Histories commission, An Imperial Typewriter has been selected by B3 Creative Network to be adapted into a mini-film, as part of their Talent Lab scheme, for BAME writers. Congratulations Divya!

The Sounds of the Cultural Quarter is a project that is recording the sounds of the Cultural Quarter both now and in the past.

For the sounds of the past, Andrew Hill of De Montfort University and Colin Hyde of the University of Leicester are using the archives held by the University of Leicester to guide them in re-creating the sounds of the Cultural Quarter in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. These sounds will include machinery from hosiery factories and printing works, buses and police cars, music from clubs.

For the sounds of the present we need your help! We are asking people who live or work in the Cultural Quarter to record up to a minute of the sound of their living or work environment on a mobile phone or recording device and send it to us for inclusion in the sound library.

The sound libraries will then be available for the public to create their own soundscapes or trails and will be used by the team to create audio trails through the Cultural Quarter of the present and the past.

This collection contains digitised resources created and repurposed by the AHRC Affective Digital Histories project. The project investigates how community ties and bonds have changed, and continue to change, through periods of decline and regeneration of urban landscapes in some of Britain's post-industrial towns and cities. Leicester's Cultural Quarter and Glossop's Howard Town and Whitfield Ward are the foci of archival, digital and commissioned work undertaken by a team of academics at the University of Leicester and external partners.

The period from the 1970s to the 1990s form the backdrop to stories 'out there' that have not been told or researched for what they can tell us about people's emotional 'feel' for a place that they and their community might have been part of in the late twentieth-century of British manufacturing history. These stories form an important tapestry of information about how certain communities think about, feel and use physical spaces that have undergone regeneration in recent decades. In Leicester, for instance, these include dance halls, rave venues and alternative clubs for a variety of uses.

This project, therefore, aims to bring together existing research on historical and heritage sites that have fallen into disuse and/or disrepair and that are now undergoing some kind of regeneration by city and local councils. Having done this, the researchers and community participants will then work closely together to develop a digital archive of open and publicly accessible data that forms a repository of some of the stories of communities that used, worked and played in these buildings.

The writing commissions have been envisioned as a means of exploring the afterlife of industrial buildings in Leicester and Glossop, as well as the relationships between people who might have used them. The commissions will contribute substantially to the task of re-imagining urban history in the East Midlands.